


Limited Queries

by kiddywonkus



Series: Limited Queries [1]
Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Adam Brody is the best, Gen, really more of a work-bro-manship, some slash if you squint hard enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 05:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6502846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiddywonkus/pseuds/kiddywonkus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brody notices something is off with Rush after he returns from the Nakai ship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limited Queries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [setralynn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/setralynn/gifts).



Brody walks into the command center, his footsteps loud against the ship’s metal floor. The rest of the room is silent, and Rush stands in front of the main control panel, his silhouette haloed in blueish light. He does not turn to greet Brody.

Rush is reliable like that.

If it were Eli, there would be “Hello” followed by an inane question; something like  “If you could fight a shark with bears for hands, or fight a bear with sharks for hands, which would you choose?” This, of course, would be followed with a sharp “Eli!” from Rush, which would make Eli sigh, and grumpily return to his viewscreen.

Brody likes working with Eli, but there is something about the air of concentration that surrounds Rush’ quiet as he stares down at the coding in Destiny’s system that Brody finds ultimately preferable. It's comforting, uplifting, and more than a little inspiring in its seriousness. It stirs something within him that makes him feel almost heroic; like the way an author must feel like when they have a new idea to write about.

Brody walks by without saying anything. He glances over at the screen as he skirts Eli’s unoccupied console, noting the shield harmonic scans on Rush’s display.The screen is static, and Brody knits his eyebrows at what he sees. The familiar scroll of running calculations is absent. In fact, the command prompt seems to be waiting for an entry, but Rush’s fingers are still. Brody notices that the other man is looking at his left hand at the corner of the monitor.

Quietly, Brody moves to his own terminal and opens up the weapons array. If Rush is working on shields, he’ll want to confirm calculations against the energy fluctuations in the main array. Brody is sure of it. But, he doesn’t think Rush will be asking any questions for a bit; not the way he stares at his left hand, his lips set in a grim line, and his eyes intensely focused on something Brody can only guess at.

Brody mentally goes through his checklist of things to do, deeming each and every one less important than the shield harmonics. But he can’t do anything about that until Rush snaps out of it. Without hesitation, he asks, “Where’s your ring?”

Rush jerks his head up, and glares steadily at Brody. Some people describe fury and irritation with adjectives like searing and blazing, but Rush is colder than that. He is more like a blast of Arctic wind when his temper turns. Survivable, but very, very unpleasant.

In response, Brody raises his eyebrows, but stands his ground. Eli may fidget, Park may go back to work with a hiccuped apology, and Volker may run away to the safety of the gate room, but Brody doesn’t move. Brody always meets Rush’s wave of irritation as if he were an island in an ocean. When Rush doesn’t answer, he presses. “Did you lose it?”

Gruffly, Rush’s voice grinds out between his teeth. “I keep you around because you don’t pester me with asinine questions.”

Brody crosses his arms, and leans forward onto the edge of his control panel. “No,” he says, making sure his voice is calm and low. “You keep me around because I know _when_ to ask questions.”

Sighing, Rush hooks his right arm up to press on the muscles of his neck.  “What does it matter what happened to my ring?”

“Oh, just that you seem preoccupied with your hand.” Brody lets the rest of that sentence hang in the air, knowing that he doesn’t have to finish for Rush to understand; knows that if he does, it will just piss Rush off, and Brody works very hard to keep Rush as far away from pissed off as possible. This is partly because he doesn’t know how much more of Volker’s clandestine venting sessions he can take, and partly because he has engines to calibrate and energy calculations to do.

Rush stops squeezing his neck, and looks up at Brody, surprise clearly etched in his expression. Then he hangs his head, and answers almost too nonchalantly. “The Nakai took it.”

“Yeah,” Brody says because he already knows that. “You didn’t try and get it back?” Again, he knows the answer, but he has to push.

“I am a sentimental man, believe it or not,” Rush bites out. “But not even I could risk my life and Chloe’s in search of a piece of metal.”

Brody makes a _hmm_ sound, and then returns to his work, trying to see where Rush’s paused calculations would lead to on his end with the weapons. Maybe there is something he can do while he waits for Rush to collect himself.

Annoyed, Rush tosses his hair out of his eyes. Brody feels a sudden sting of panic prickle up his nerve-endings upon seeing the movement. A mental alarm screeches through his mind, warning him not to push it further. Brody holds his breath, worried that even the sound of inhaling would be the final straw.

Instead, Rush exhales slowly, and then looks back down at the monitor. A set of equations flares up on Brody’s screen.

Brody attempts to enter the numbers Rush sent into the appropriate places in the program, and runs a simulation, but he gets an error code. He frowns at it, and begins to look it over line by line, not confident he’ll find the problem before Rush does, but wanting to do something anyway.

Sometimes, after hours and hours of staring at glowing white Ancient, Brody longs for the streamlined understandability of a shuttle, or a door mechanism. Not this convoluted translation of Ancient thoughts. Humans always think that the simplest language is math, the universal language, but the more and more Brody works with the Stargates, he realizes that even the Ancient codes, equations, and calculations are steeped heavily in a cultural context that working on a piece of hardware just doesn’t have.

“Did you ever marry, Mr. Brody?” Rush’s voice is quiet as he breaks Brody’s concentration.

Brody looks up from his screen, but Rush does not return his gaze. The other man’s eyes are on his display, but unfocused.

“No.” Brody shifts his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

For some reason, Rush smiles softly at that. “Why not?”

Brody bites the corner of his lip, and frowns. The reasons he told himself seemed perfectly understandable until this moment. But now, he has to voice it and this isn’t some Kino footage no one is going to see. This is Rush, the most judgemental human being alive in this galaxy, if not the universe. “I, uh…”

Brody struggles to say it even though he thought about the prospect for so long that his rational was unassailable. The truth was, he always wanted someone to come home to, to lay next to on a Sunday morning, but... “The second I walked through the Stargate…” Brody pauses again. “I just kind of knew I’d die in space. Why bring someone that kind of pain?”

Rush snorts, and tilts his head. “What about before the Stargate program?”

“Hard to remember a time before. I guess I was just busy.”

Grimacing, Rush glances back at his left hand again. The silence between them is oppressive, and Brody feels the uncharacteristic urge to fill it- anything to distract from whatever Rush is thinking about.

“And too young,” Brody continues. “I came to the program pretty early. I was a first-year Engineering MA at School of Mines.” Brody presses a few buttons on his screen so he feels like he’s multitasking, but all it’s doing is moving him from display to another. Really, he thinks he’s talking too much, and any minute Rush is going to dismiss him with an impatient huff.

Rush also hits a few buttons distractedly, but Brody can’t see what he’s doing.“If that were the case, I would expect your Ancient to be much better than it is.”

“It’s better now.” Brody raises his hands defensively. “Got a pretty good crash course here. But I came on as a grad student, and I worked with hardware more anyway.”

“That’s unusual. Who was your dissertation supervisor? I hope it wasn’t McKay.”

Brody laughs at that thought. “No. That would be awful. Worse than you.”

Rush shrugs at the insult. “Seems a bit much to believe that they would give an engineering MA prospectus an NDA for the Stargate program.”

“Oh, they didn’t initially. My professor was working on a tangential project that I later found out was a docking mechanism on the Daedalus, and they sort of just recruited me from there. I didn’t actually graduate. This,” Brody gestures at the small, dark, and very cold room, “seemed like more fun.”

Rush inclines his head, a small derisive snort escaping as he does so. “Well done. Turns out education isn’t everything.” Brody isn’t sure, but Rush's tone sounds almost rueful.

“It’s helpful.” Brody shrugs, his mind straying to Eli. The college dropout managed to solve a problem Rush had spent years on. But then again, Eli could never have figured it out if someone hadn't created the equation in the first place. They needed Rush to define the problems that had to be solved. They need him still for that same reason, among many others.

In his mind, sparks flash in the corners of the control room. Brody shudders at the memory of loud booms echoed through the halls as the ship shook with every volley the Nakai threw at them. When Rush was on Nakai ship and Eli had to deal with the battle against them, it was hard not to know how utterly fucked they were without the man. Education isn’t everything, Brody thinks, but it is sure goddamn useful in a firefight against the Nakai. Even Brody struggled to understand the exclusions and limit queries Rush had placed on the shields while he watched the systems failing around them, sparks singing their skin, and steam clogging their lungs.

He is still surprised at his calm as they faced down their deaths, but then again, he knows he is going to die in space. If his life ends today, it would not be too soon because he had the chance to walk through the Stargate.

Brody’s fingers brushes across the screen, bringing back the weapons display. His eyes flick through the code, looking for what is clearly Ancient, and what is Rush’s estimation of Ancient. Brilliant as Rush is, it always looks hamfisted in comparison to Eli’s now that Brody knows to look for the differences.

Try as he can, he doesn’t quite understand it. It’s linked through another system. Brody frowns, and grabs the screen as he scans the code. But the error goes away as Rush sends another set of calculations for Brody to run.

Again, the screen flashes red.

“It’s because you linked it through… life support?” Brody says, his mind already working on why. There was no way they could have figured this out in the Nakai attack. Ah, because life support has a maximum operational energy. Link shield up through that, and its max capacity is also limited.

Kind of brilliant. But also, kind of mad.

Rush doesn’t answer, which usually means “You’re right, Mr. Brody. Well done.”

“Why not put an exclusion in the shields programming?” The moment the question escapes Brody’s lips, he braces himself. This is a Volker question. Rush hates Volker questions- the kind of questions you could figure out yourself. Never mind it would be faster for Volker to just hear it from Rush and move on. What Rush cares about is his time, and he doesn’t have enough of it for small explanations. 30 minutes of Volker's time figuring it out is worth less than one minute of Rush explaining it.

At least, that is what Rush would have you believe. Brody suspects that Rush was an asshole to Volker once, and feels like he has a reputation to maintain.

Brody shakes his head. Rush doesn’t have time to waste on posturing like that.

“That’s what I’m trying to do," says Rush.

Brody frowns at the code, and begins to diagram it out in his head. Something is missing, but he doesn’t know what. Rush obviously doesn’t either, and Brody does not need to remind him of that fact.

On the other side of the room, Rush leans on the control panel, his fingers gripping the edges. Brody tries to ignore it, but the tension is obviously building in his body. Usually, this would be when Rush would stalk off, but instead, he bangs his hand down hard against the console. “God damn it!” he yells.

Brody stays quiet, but he stops working on the code. Warily, he eyes Rush, taking in the man’s stance and expression.

The outburst seems to have calmed him. His body is slumped, and his right hand holds onto the console loosely, and his hair flops across his face but Brody can see resignation playing across his features.

“I was married,” Rush says quietly.

Brody nods, because of course Rush was. Maybe no one else notices, but when things go bad, the ring is the first thing Rush fiddles with. Brody doesn’t know the connection between stress, and Rush’s ne’er-mentioned wife, but he has guesses.

“She was dying when they came to me with the Stargate program.”

Brody tries to keep his expression neutral, but he can’t keep his eyes from widening slightly at the admission, but Rush doesn’t look up at him to know. Instead, he stares at the floor, seemingly unwilling to face Brody even as he voices his secrets.

“It was an excuse not to deal with losing her. Every time I fail…” Rush brings his hand up to rest on his chest, “I think…”

He doesn’t finish the thought, but Brody knows where it is going. If Rush doesn’t continue on with Destiny’s mission, it means that he had ignored his wife’s pain for nothing. He would have to face that he was selfish when the person he loved was suffering.

Brody wonders if the ruthless rationalism he admires in Rush isn’t so much a personal trait, but a vendetta against the man who he should have been for his wife. If he even once lets himself be emotionally compromised, it would have meant he could have let himself be as she slipped away from this universe. But he didn't, and now he can never let himself be ever again.

In a way, they are similar. Brody, for choosing not to love when he wants to, and Rush for choosing to pretend that love isn’t everything. But the two know better. They do. And it is those thoughts of something he won’t let himself have that sometimes keeps Brody up at night, and he doesn’t doubt that it’s the same with Rush.

Brody doesn’t say anything to Rush’s confession. Instead, he looks through the code, and sees a line that seems a little strange. On a normal day, he would not mention it because even he can see that it’s not the big problem. But today, one day after Rush came back from the dead and lost his wedding ring to an incomprehensible alien race, is not a normal day.

“I think there might be a duplicate object in the systems that is confusing the command protocols,” Brody says.

Rush slowly looks up at him, and Brody quirks his lips in what he hopes is a small, but warm smile. Rush smiles back, almost wanly but not quite, and shakes his head.

“Let’s look at that then,” Rush says.

“Yeah.”

And the room feels quiet again, in the comfortable way Brody likes, as they trade coding, sending compiling errors with notes. Brody lets himself glance at Rush a few times as they work, and notes his posture, and expression. It's not the same as it had been before the Nakai, but at least its closer.

Brody smiles at Rush when the other man is not looking, and then he gets back to work.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> -This is unbeta-ed... so typos will probably be present. If one bothers you, let me know.
> 
> \- I talk quite a lot about Brody in my SGU podcast, Charlie Foxtrot (sgupodcast.tumblr.com), and I thought I should write out a fic that actually illustrates my feelings about the man. He's a background character, to be sure, but he has so much more depth than that. Even in the first few episodes, you can see a quiet man who keeps his head down, gets to work, and will back Rush up in everything he does. He's calm, rational, loving, and far smarter than anyone gives him credit for. So this is sort of my my love song to Brody, who unbelievably managed to surpass my love for Lisa Park (though she is a VERY close second).
> 
> \- I obviously suck at computer science, but since the Ancients probably don't code in the same way we do, I'm just going to chalk any weirdnesses up to that. :) Though if you are more code-y, and would like to help me fix those sections, I would love that.
> 
> \- This started as a platonic-work-bromance, but honestly, the ending has got me thinking that more could be possible... but then again, I have a weak spot for unfailingly rational couples.


End file.
